Writing craft
Craft advice is easy to over-apply. Most of the well-known rules describe a tendency worth noticing, not a law worth obeying, and a manuscript edited strictly to any of them reads worse than one edited with judgement.
These guides cover what each convention is actually for, and when the version that breaks it is the better sentence.
20 articles
Punctuation in Fiction: A Reference
Most of what a copyeditor queries is not error but inconsistency.
How to Write Description
The question is not whether it is vivid. It is what else it is doing.
Unreliable Narrators: How to Write One
The craft is in the gap: enough for the reader to notice before the narrator does.
How to Write Flashbacks
Raise the question first. A flashback before the curiosity is just backstory in a frame.
How to Use Foreshadowing
Plant it as characterisation, and the reader files it without suspicion.
Head-Hopping in Fiction
Omniscient is a choice. Head-hopping is a slip, and readers feel it without naming it.
How to Punctuate Dialogue
Could the words after the speech stand as their own sentence? That is the whole test.
How to Avoid Info Dumps and Handle Exposition
Give the information to somebody who wants it, at the moment they want it.
Filter Words in Fiction
She saw the door open, or the door opened. One of these puts you in the room.
Deep POV Explained
Third person written with the intimacy of first, and the four things it takes away.
Fixing a Sagging Middle
Mark ten scenes as initiated or reactive. The answer is the diagnosis.
How to Write Subplots
This thread makes the main plot harder by ___. If you cannot finish that sentence, cut it.
Writing Multiple Points of View
What does this viewpoint know that no other one does? A blank means cut it.
How to Structure a Scene
Want, resistance, turn. If you cannot name all three, the prose is not the problem.
How to Write a First Chapter
One job: make the second chapter feel necessary.
How to End a Novel
Remove the protagonist from the last scene. If the outcome holds, the ending is not theirs.
How to Edit Dialogue Without Flattening Every Voice
Edit fictional dialogue for purpose, tension, character voice and clarity without making every speaker sound
Passive Voice in Fiction and When to Keep It
Learn how passive voice works in fiction, when it weakens a sentence and when it usefully controls emphasis
Show and Tell in Fiction Without Following a Formula
Choose when to dramatise and when to summarise in fiction, with concrete tests for emotion, backstory, pacing and
How to Dictate a Novel and Edit the Transcript
Dictate a novel without producing an unusable transcript.
Writing craft, on your own manuscript.
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